February 4, 1931

First five-year plan (Soviet Union)

Stalin demands a faster industrial tempo in “The Tasks of Business Executives”

Listing the resources the Soviet Union possessed, Stalin said it had everything it needed — "except, perhaps, rubber."

A closing speech to 728 managers

On 4 February 1931, at the final sitting of the First All-Union Conference of Leading Personnel of Socialist Industry in Moscow, Joseph Stalin delivered the speech later published as "The Tasks of Business Executives." The official account puts 728 delegates in the hall.

The audience was factory directors, engineers, foremen, construction chiefs, shock workers and party and trade-union officials. Sergo Ordzhonikidze had presented the report on the 1931 control figures, and Vyacheslav Molotov had addressed the conference the day before.

Stalin endorsed those figures, including a pledged 45 percent increase in industrial output and completion of the plan in three years in the "basic, decisive" branches.

What he actually argued

He rejected proposals to slow the tempo, said backward and weak countries were vulnerable to being beaten, plundered and enslaved, and declared that the USSR must close a claimed fifty- or hundred-year gap within ten years.

That is narrower than the claim that only strong industrialised countries win wars; his argument concerned old Russia's vulnerability to stronger exploitative powers. His closing sentence appears as "we shall go under" in the 1954 English edition and as "we will be crushed" in other translations — a difference of translation, not two speeches.

The speech's principal operational demand was that Communist industrial managers master technology, science, finance and day-to-day production instead of signing orders and leaving technical work to older specialists.

What the speech did not do

It neither launched nor formally altered collectivisation. Forced collectivisation had accelerated from late 1929 and the First Five-Year Plan was already underway, so this was not their starting point.

Stalin had just acknowledged that the previous year's targeted 31–32 percent increase had produced a reported 25 percent. Those were official Soviet claims delivered as political persuasion, not independently verified economic measurements.

The conference closed with directives on technical mastery, one-man management, business accounting, labour productivity, lower production costs and improved output quality, and Pravda published the speech on 5 February.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 8 sources not yet audited

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